6/28/2010 @ 6:00AM

We Can't Get Rid Of Spam

Spam may well be one of those IT problems that never completely goes away, like rust on a ship. There are filters and services that can keep it to a manageable level, but even those don’t get rid of the problem entirely. Some of it still creeps through spam blockers, ultimately costing companies sizable amounts of money in terms of storage and employee productivity that is used to read it and delete it.

There are plenty of tools and services available to reduce the flow of electronic trash, which includes everything from harmless marketing to phishing and malware attacks. But none of it works completely, and even the tools and services that do work don’t work all the time.

So where does all of this stuff come from? Remarkably, the bulk of it is created in Europe–or at least runs through servers based in Europe–according to a study by AppRiver, which just issued a report. Of the 26 billion spam messages the company claims to have quarantined over the first six months of the year, nearly 45% came from Europe, 26% from Asia and another 14% from North America. Africa accounted for less than 1%.

The United States is still the single biggest producer of spam with more than 2.5 billion messages, followed by Brazil and India, which are close together with about 1.6 billion messages apiece, and from there it’s neck-and-neck between Poland, Russia, the Ukraine, Germany, the Republic of Korea, Romania and France.

Spam, which originally was a trademark for Hormel’s canned spiced ham, took its electronic name from a Monty Python comedy skit in which every item on the breakfast menu included Spam. Some items on the menu mentioned Spam multiple times, giving rise to the word “spam” in the online context.

For most e-mail users with spam filters, electronic trash remains more of an annoyance than a real problem. But for companies, particularly those with thousands of employees and sensitive corporate data, electronic spam can be a much more serious problem. Aside from the bandwidth and storage problem, which is growing as spam goes increasingly multimedia, it’s one of the primary entry points for security risks, and the price of managing everything effectively can move from the point of just noise to a line item on an IT budget.

It’s the source of many of the viruses that permeate corporations, malware in the form of electronic robots, or “bots,” and denial-of-service attacks. And the volume goes up significantly around major holidays or around major events such as the Haiti earthquake, the Icelandic eruption and the
BP
disaster in the Gulf, according to the AppRiver report.

Tackling the problem head-on doesn’t work because there is no head. What the Internet does extremely well is link one to many and many to many, which is the whole basis of social networking and online publishing, search and marketing. The choices are blocking all traffic or limiting the traffic, or living with the threat, a decision based on risk management and cost modeling.

Given the growing number of spam messages, not to mention the growing size of spam files, the overall impact of whatever measures have been taken appears to be imperceptible. It doesn’t look as if anyone has made much of a dent in the problem, and in many ways it’s actually getting worse. That means CIOs had better get comfortable with a line item in their budget for managing spam, because they certainly aren’t going to get rid of it. And while they’re at it, they might want to order some extra storage.

Ed Sperling is the editor of several technology trade publications and has covered technology for more than 20 years. Contact him at esperlin@yahoo.com.